Uncanny Architecture and the ‘Terrible Place’:

Representations of the Gothic Space in Shirley

Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House
Following on from the castles and subterranean spaces of eighteenth and nineteenth
century Gothic literature the place of terror transformed in the twentieth century to the
haunted house. Unlike the fantastical monsters within the archaic Gothic castles the ghosts
of the haunted houses “have their origin within us. They are present whenever the
significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by
the strange” (McNeillie, A., Woolf, V. 1988. p.324). In The Haunting of Hill House Jackson
uses the haunted house to critically reconsider the relationship between the self and place.
What makes Hill House a Gothic space is that it forces the inhabitants to reflect inwards on
their own psychological state which in turn evokes “an ambivalence of the spirit” (Jackson,
S. 2014. p.6) and produces a “fear of self”(p.6). I will be analysing how Jackson uses the
uncanny nature and appearance of the haunted house to demonstrate that the true Gothic
terrors are not monsters but instead are within us that “we build ourselves” (Jackson, S.
2014. p.6) and that certain spaces force us to confront the “absolute reality” (Jackson, S.
2009. p.3) of the self.

The history of America does not allow for its Gothic to be archaic in setting as they did not
experience the medieval Dark Age that European Gothic so heavily refers to, instead
American Gothic focuses on domestic terror. Therefore The Haunting of Hill House does not
consist of the traditional European Gothic tropes like the “old castle” (Hemmings, F. W. J.
2012. p.69), “murdered bodies” (p.69) or “skeletons, in chests” (p.69), instead Jackson uses
the haunted house to create a uniquely American Gothic tale. However what makes The
Haunting of Hill House so inherently American is not the novels origins or that of the writer
but instead it is the Gothic “Thing” (Lloyd-Smith, A. 2004. p.72), the ‘figure of enigmatic
“something else”, replete with meanings but not decipherable’(p.72) that ‘can be said to
haunt American Gothic writing’ (p.72). The “thing” (Jackson, S. 2009. p.203) supposedly
haunting Hill House is left so ambiguous that the psychological state of Eleanor is
questioned as seen when Theodora states “maybe, of course, you wrote it yourself”
(Jackson, S. 2009. p.147) in regard to the chalk message. It is this ambiguity that is the most
unsettling feature of the novel as it cannot be determined whether Eleanor is delusional or
if the house truly possesses her.

Jackson uses three Gothic themes to describe the appearance of Hill House, the sublime, the
excessive and the uncanny. The very first description of Hill House is sublimely Gothic as the
narrator states it “stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within” (Jackson, S.
2009. p.3). Isolation is a key feature in Gothic literature and similarly to the castle in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula that is “on the very edge of a terrible precipice” (Auerbach, N., Skal, D.J.,
Stoker, B. 1997. p.31) making it a “veritable prison” (p.32) Jackson also has her characters
physically isolated inside a property that is “completely surrounded” (Jackson, S. 2009.
p.112). However instead of having her characters trapped with a monster Jackson traps
hers with only themselves and “absolute reality” (Jackson, S. 2009. p.3). This isolation
forces Eleanor to reflect upon her fears of being alone and continuing to live seeing herself
“dissolve and slip and separate” (Jackson, S. 2009. p.106). Therefore Jackson uses the
isolation of Hill House to express how the true horror lies within us and what really haunts
Eleanor is the “demon in the mind” (McNeillie, A., Woolf, V. 1988. p.324) rather than the
supernatural.

Jackson also uses Hill House to examine the Gothic theme of the uncanny which Freud
describes as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long
familiar” (Freud, S., Hertz, N. 1997. p.195). The Gothic irregularities of Hill House can be
considered uncanny as the house forces the inhabitants to re-evaluate their perceptions of
reality and acknowledge that they had trusted too blindly in their “senses of balance and
reason” (Jackson, S. 2009. p.107) that the mind fights “wildly to preserve” (p.107). Jackson
has the vileness of the house come from its very structure as “every angle is slightly wrong”
(Jackson, S. 2009. p.105) causing a “distortion in the house” (p.106). By having the root of
the uncanny in the very makeup of the house Jackson is exploring how the core of a being
may not be as it initially appears, as our “familiar stable patterns” (Jackson, S. 2009. p.107)
try to overlook evidence of the truth. However Jackson in many ways inverts the uncanny as
Hill House is not exactly the familiar made unfamiliar but instead is a “vile” (Jackson, S.
2009. p.33) “haunted house” (p.201) that is familiarized by Eleanor as she declares “I am
home, I am home” (p.232). By having Eleanor embrace Hill House as her home Jackson is
expressing that “the house itself, and the terrible things that happen there emerge from and
express her inner life” (Jackson, S. 2014. p.1); therefore by surrendering to the house
Eleanor is surrendering to herself.

For Coleridge on entering a sublimely Gothic space one “expands into the infinite” until “the
only sensible expression left is, ‘that I am nothing!’” (as cited in Groom, M. 2012. p.28).
Eleanor similarly experiences “a complete extinction of the self” (Groom, M. 2012. p.28) as
she feels consumed by the house, like “a small creature swallowed whole by a monster”
(Jackson, S. 2009. p.42). Ultimately in the end of the novel Eleanor’s self is completely
eradicated as she commits suicide by driving into a tree. This suicide is due to Eleanor’s
inability to leave the “comforts” (Jackson, S. 2009. p.244) of a home that she feels “belongs
to me” (p.245). By having Eleanor claim the house as her own Jackson shows us the true
vulnerability of Eleanor as she has never yet had a home of her own. Therefore due to
desperation to stay somewhere she feels she belongs Eleanor cannot “go back the way she
came” (Jackson, S. 2009. p.243) making suicide the only way she can stay at Hill House.

In The Haunting of Hill House Jackson explores the “fear of self” (Jackson, S. 2014. p.6)
through the use of a very American Gothic space. By having the place of terror being a
house Jackson can explore the uncanny relationship between surroundings and the
psychological state. Jackson uses the “grotesquely” (Jackson, S. 2009. p.112) excessive and
Gothic Hill House with its “manic juxtaposition[s]” (p.34) to emulate the disturbing nature
of confronting oneself psychologically. Eleanor’s progressively worsening psychological
state can be seen with her intensifying connection to the house, until the point where she
can “even hear, with her new awareness of the house, the dust drifting gently in the attics”
(Jackson, S. 2009. p.223). Not only does Hill House force Eleanor and its former inhabitants
to accept the reality of their own identities but The Haunting of Hill House also forces the
reader to critically reconsider what constitutes as terror as Jackson does not use monsters
to evoke fear. Instead she has the very nature of the haunting be an internal haunting on the
mind as she only uses the supernatural “to provide metaphors for the all-too-real terrors of
the natural" (Hyman, S.E. 1966. p.viii).

Bibliography
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Freud, S., Hertz, N. (1997). Writings on Art and Literature. California, Stanford University
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Groom, M. (2012). The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Hemmings, F. W. J. (2012). ‘Recipe for a Gothic novel’ in Culture and Society in France 1789-
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Jackson, S. (2009). The Haunting of Hill House. Penguin Classics Edition. London, Penguin
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Jackson, S. (2014). The Haunting of Hill House. Google eBook, Bikki Barnabá s.

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McNeillie, A., Woolf, V. (1988).‘Henry James’s Ghost Stories’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf.
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